From the recent Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, evidence from computer simulations suggests that there is collusion in the Eurovision vote.
It is necessary to be quite clear on one point. No allegation of governmental or other national authority interference in voting is made in this paper, nor indeed has been made in any of the other papers on the subject by various authors. During the era of jury voting, when each country’s votes were decided by a group of a dozen or so of its citizens, it might have been, in principle, possible for some pressure to have been exerted on individuals. However, in the modern era, telephone voting has increased “jury” sizes to the hundreds of thousands in some countries (Haan et al. 2005). The telephone vote is verified by an EBU adjudicator, thus making any central attempt to influence the result highly unlikely. One might therefore expect collusion to have been greater in the jury era, and to have disappeared as large numbers of individual members of the public were permitted to vote by telephone. However, precisely the opposite is the case. Collusion during the jury era was limited to a few transient partnerships, of which only the Greece-Cyprus and Croatia-Malta partnerships lasted longer than one five-year window of analysis. It is therefore clear that collusion is a mass psychological phenomenon.